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A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.s4: 4. Ārya Çūra and later Poetry

A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.s4

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English

4. Ārya Çūra and later Poetry

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The influence of Açvaghoṣa is unquestionably to be traced in the elegant and interesting collection of lectures or sermons in the form of edifying anecdotes of the Buddha’s action in former births produced by Ārya Çūra under the style of *Jātakamālā*.² The mere fact that the tales appear in Sanskrit of the Kāvya type is sufficient proof of the spread of the use of that language for purposes of literature and discussion in the courtly circles in which, we may safely assume, Ārya Çūra moved and lived. The material of the tales was doubtless ready to hand; nearly all of them are extant in the Pāli Jātaka book,¹ and twelve of them are also found in the Pāli *Cariyāpiṭaka*. Moreover, as in that book, the tales are told with the definite purpose of illustrating the various perfections (*pāramitās*) ascribed by Buddhist theory to the Buddha to be. Their chief defect to modern taste is the extravagance which refuses to recognize the Aristotelian mean. The very first tale, which is not in the Jātaka book, tells of the extraordinary benevolence of the Bodhisattva who insists on sacrificing his life in order to feed a hungry tigress, whom he finds on the point of devouring the young whom she can no longer feed, and the other narratives are no less inhuman in the disproportion between the worth of the object sacrificed and that for whose sake the sacrifice is made. But these defects were deemed rather merits by contemporary and later taste. I-tsing mentions the *Jātakamālā* as one of the popular works among Buddhists of his day, and the frescoes of Ajaṇṭā include both pictures and verses, proving the existence then of the text. The date of this evidence, unfortunately, is not certain, but the style of writing suggests the sixth century, and with this accords the fact that a Chinese rendering of another work of Ārya Çūra was made in A. D. 434. The author may then have written in the third, or more probably the fourth, century.

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² Ed. H. Kern, HOS. i, 1891; trans. J. S. Speyer, London, 1895. Cf. Lüders, GN. 1902, pp. 758 ff.; F. W. Thomas, *Album Kern*, pp. 405 ff.; on the Chinese version, Ivanovski, RHR. xlvii. 298 ff.; cf. E. Wohlgemuth, *Über die chinesische Version von Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita* (Leipzig, 1916).

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¹ GN. 1918, pp. 464 ff.

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Ārya Çūra's style is classical, showing command of the resources of his art, but restrained and saved from exaggeration by good taste. His prose and verse alike are careful and polished, and, though he is not averse to the use of fairly long compounds, especially in prose, he employs them naturally and is seldom obscure. His good taste is conspicuous in the lines put in the mouth of the son whose father in his insensate generosity has given away his wife and children; the child speaks in simple but pathetic words:

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*naivedaṁ me tathā duḥkhaṁ yad ayaṁ hanti māṁ dvijaḥ*
*nāpaçyam ambāṁ yat tv adya tad vidārayatīva mām*

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*rodiṣyati ciraṁ nūnam ambā çūnye tapovane*
*putraçokena kṛpaṇā hataçāveva cātakī.*
*asmadarthe samāhṛtya vanān mūlaphalaṁ bahu*
*bhaviṣyati kathaṁ nv ambā dṛṣṭvā çūnyaṁ tapovanam?*
*ime nāv açvakās tāta hastikā rathakāç ca ye*
*ato ’rdhaṁ deyam ambāyai çokaṁ tena vineṣyati.*

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‘’Tis not so much that the Brahmin beats me that causes me sorrow, but that I have not seen my mother to-day pierces my heart. Long will my mother weep in the penance grove, now lonely, sorrowing for the woes of her children, like a cuckoo whose young are slain. She has gathered for our sake many a fruit and root from the forest; how then will she feel when she sees the penance grove left lonely? Here, daddy, are our toy horses, our elephants, our cars; give a half to mother; thus will she assuage her grief.’ But he is equally happy in more elaborate themes, as in the description of the rule of the just king:

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*samaprabhāvā svajane jane ca: dharmānugā tasya hi daṇḍanītiḥ*
*adharmyam āvṛtya janasya mārgaṁ: sopānamāleva divo babhūva.*

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‘Impartial to kin and stranger alike, his rule followed in the steps of righteousness; blocking the path of unrighteousness to men, it was as a ladder to raise them to the sky.’ No doubt in his language there are traces here and there of Pālicisms,¹ but these do not seriously detract from Ārya Çūra’s claim to correctness of language, and his metrical skill is considerable.

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¹ He is praised in the *Saduktikarṇāmṛta*, ZDMG. xxxvi. 365. For his Pālicisms. see Franke, IF. v. Anz. 31.

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The form of his tales as composed of prose with verses intermingled, now singly, now in larger numbers, is of historical interest. It is not, of course, an invention of Ārya Çūra, who followed Kumāralāta and doubtless many others in the employment of this style. But its origin is disputed. Oldenberg² developed with his usual skill the thesis that the original form of literature in India, as perhaps elsewhere, was prose, with verses interposed at those points where the primitive mind naturally tends to give utterance to its feelings in verse form, as when a god is invoked, a curse is pronounced, a benediction uttered, a prayer put up, in short at any point where emotion is let free and the pedestrian prose is inadequate as an expression of the feeling. He has found proofs of the existence of literature of this kind in the *Ṛgveda*, the Brāhmaṇas, the epic, and in Pāli texts, including the Jātakas. In principle the verses alone were preserved in fixed form, and they only received skill and care, the prose being supplied by those who told the tales. The process of development which followed was, on the one hand, the elimination of the prose by substituting verse, and it has been suggested that a remnant of the old condition is to be found in the *Mahābhārata*, where the speakers in case of dialogue are given in prose, while in the more finished *Rāmāyaṇa* such devices are unknown, the poet, like the authors of the *Iliad* and *Odyssey*, working into verse the name of the spokesman. On the other hand, the step was taken of applying to the prose the artistic polish which marked the verse, and Oldenberg¹ claims that, apart from an exceptional case like the *Kuṇāla Jātaka* of the Pāli Jātaka book, where the verses are accompanied by an ornate prose, the *Jātakamālā* and the *Pañcatantra* or *Tantrākhyāyika* are among the earliest examples of this form.

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² GGA. 1909, pp. 66 ff.; GN. 1911, pp. 459 ff.; 1919, pp. 79 ff. Cf. Winternitz, WZKM. xxiii. 102 ff.

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¹ *Altind. Prosa*, pp. 82 ff. What is true is that elaboration of prose style is later than and based on development of verse; cf. Jacobi, *Compositum und Nebensatz*, p. 93, who cites the symmetrical Varṇakas of the Jain canon and their long compounds (cf. IS. xvii. 389 ff.).

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It seems clear for reasons elsewhere adduced² that the theory is not substantiated by Vedic evidence, and that it must stand or fall according as other considerations may appear to render it credible. The evidence of comparative literature is still quite inadequate to support it, and from the Indian point of view matters can much more simply be explained. The earliest form of prose with verse intermingled which we find in Indian literature appears to be that in which gnomic verse is cited to illustrate what is stated in the prose; this is akin to the practice of the Brāhmaṇas to adduce occasionally Yajñagāthās, verses on sacrificial points, in their discussions, and to the habit of the Dharma-sūtras to enforce the rules which they lay down with verse citations. Here and there in the Upaniṣads we find similar cases, verses being cited in illustration and explanation of a doctrine stated in prose; in these cases it is made quite clear that the verses are quotations, from which, no doubt, it was an easy step to the writer composing verses of his own to enliven his theme or summarize his moral. The Kārikās found in the *Mahābhāṣya* prove that grammarians recognized the convenience of thus putting on record in easily remembered and accurate form their observations on disputed points. In the case of narrative the evidence seems clearly to indicate that originally in India prose and verse were used independently; if so, it is easy to understand how they could come to be combined, especially as in the other instances adduced above there already existed examples of the combination of verse and prose in one literary form. The few cases in the epic of prose and verse combined seem to be distinctly instances of contamination, not remnants of an older form of composition. How far models in Pāli were available for the author of the *Jātakamālā* or Kumāralāta we cannot, of course, prove, for the Jātaka book in Pāli as we have it presents grave problems which are yet unsolved. But the *Kuṇāla Jātaka* at any rate suggests that it would be unwise to claim that the transition first took place in Sanskrit versions of Jātaka tales.

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² Keith, JRAS. 1911, pp. 979 ff.; 1912, pp. 429 ff.; HOS. xxv. 43 ff. There are cases of intermixture of prose and verse in other languages, e. g. Latin (Varro's *Saturae Menippeae*, Petronius, Martianus Capella (*c.* A. D. 400), Boethius (480–524), and two novels, Julius Valerius (*c.* 300) and *Historia Apollonii Tyrii*; Teuffel-Schwabe, *Rom. Lit.*, §§ 28, 165, 305, 399, 452, 478, and 489); Norse; Mediaeval Irish (Windisch, *Irische Texte*, iii. 447 ff.); Chinese; Old Picard, *Aucassin et Nicolett*; Boccaccio's *L'Ameto*; Sa'dī's *Gulistān*; Basutos and Eskimos (MacCulloch, *Childhood of Fiction*, pp. 480 ff.); Gray, *Vāsavadattā*, p. 32.

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Other Buddhist writers contributed much less to literature than to philosophy. The mysterious Nāgārjuna, perhaps of the latter part of the second century A.D., in his *Madhyamakakārikās* shows a perverse ability to develop paradoxes, while Ārya Deva (*c.* A.D. 250) in his *Catuḥçatikā*¹ shows considerable power of irony in his onslaught on the Brahmanical practice of bathing in the Ganges to remove sin and acquire merit. The *Çiṣyalekhadharmakāvya*² of Candragomin, in which instruction is given in the form of a letter to a pupil dealing with the essential facts of the Buddhist faith, has a predecessor in the *Suhṛllekha*¹ of Nāgārjuna, in which he summarizes Buddhist doctrine for a king, unhappily unidentified. The *Subhāṣitāvali* cites a verse actually found in the letter, though omitted in the Tibetan version:

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¹ Ed. Calcutta, 1914. On his *Hastavālaprakaraṇavṛtti*, cf. Thomas and Ui, JRAS. 1918, pp. 267 ff. Cf. P. L. Vaidya, *Études sur Āryadeva* (Paris, 1923).

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² Ed. I. P. Minayeff, *Zapiski*, iv.

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¹ Trans. H. Wenzel, JPTS. 1886, pp. 1 ff.; for the king Sātavāhana, cf. Vidyabhusana, POCP. 1919, ii. 125.

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*viṣasya viṣayāṇāṁ ca dūram atyantam antaram*
*upabhuktaṁ viṣaṁ hanti viṣayāḥ smaraṇād api.*

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‘Vast indeed the difference between poison and objects of sense; poison slays only when tasted, but the things of sense by mere thought thereof.’ The name of the author is given in the text as Candragopin, but on the whole it is improbable that he is to be distinguished from Candragomin, and we may place him in the seventh century A.D., as his grammar was used in the *Kāçikā Vṛtti*, while he seems to have been alive as late as the time of I-tsing, though his reference is not free from doubt. As might be expected from a grammarian, the poem is written in correct and fluent Sanskrit, but without special distinction.

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The case is other with Çāntideva, author of the laborious compendium of Buddhist dogmatics of the Mahāyāna school, the *Çikṣāsamuccaya*, in his *Bodhicaryāvatāra*,² in which he sketches the career of him who seeks to attain Buddhahood as opposed to the narrow Hīnayāna ideal of saintship. Çāntideva, who lived in the seventh century and whom tradition alleges to have been the son of a king who was induced by the goddess Tārā to lay aside royal state, disclaims any literary pretension; he writes for himself only and for those of nature akin to his. His poem is a strange blend of passionate devotion to the aim of aiding men to achieve freedom from the miseries of life coupled with the utter negativism of the Mahāyāna philosophy. There is nothing real, nothing can be gained or lost, none honoured or despised; joy and sorrow, love and hate, all are idle names, without reality; search as you will, nothing can be found that is. None the less Çāntideva seems to be intoxicated with the nobility of the aim of seeking to be a saviour of mankind; the good we do in our efforts is a joy to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; we are allied with them in the struggle to attain the end. It is a delusion by which we treat our own bodies as something essentially our own; we must realise that the grief of another is our own, the joy of another not alien to us. The poetic power of the author stands out brilliantly when contrasted with the uninspired verses in which his predecessors Vasubandhu and his brother Asaṅga, probably in the fourth century, preached their doctrines. Of the latter we have the *Mahāyānasūtrālaṁkāra*, written in correct but undistinguished Sanskrit, utterly overloaded with technicalities, and, despite its great length and the obvious efforts of the author to express himself effectively, deplorably obscure. But the poem is of literary interest as proving how fully Buddhist teachers had adopted Sanskrit as their literary medium.

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² Ed. de la Vallée Poussin, BI. 1901 ff.; trans. Paris, 1907.

Cites (15)